Review: Macbeth at the Abbey

‘Macbeth’ is the everyman’s tragedy. He lacks the nobility of Othello, the intellect of Hamlet, the authority of Lear. He is Shakespeare’s premonition of Tony Soprano – always in slightly above his head, struggling to catch up, resorting to horrific violence in a bid to assert himself over a fate he can’t quite master. For someone who orders the murder of children, it is extraordinary how sympathetic he is.

The authenticity of Macbeth

Aged 16, I got my break in the theatre. Playing a broom carrier in the school production of Macbeth, I arrived for the performance to find myself promoted. A classmate had fallen ill.

My new role was that of the Captain in the second scene: gravely wounded from battle, he reports to King Duncan how bravely Macbeth has fought. For a tortured hour, I frantically paced the school corridors, feverishly trying to learn my newly acquired lines.

When my moment came, I stumbled on stage, convincingly dazed. “Doubtful it stood,” I intoned, without the first idea of what I was talking about, and promptly forgot the entire remainder of my short speech.

Theatre in the Noughties: the decade’s top ten

Ten years ago, the British theatre impresario Michael Kustow issued an impassioned plea for the theatre, in a book with the now quaint title, ‘Theatre@Risk’. Faced with the overwhelming forces of both the internet and global capital, Kustow wondered, would theatre survive?

It seemed for a while during this decade that Irish theatre makers were responding to this challenge by including bits of video in their plays and calling them “multimedia”.

The response may have been glib, but the challenge was real. New media offer genuinely new means of entertainment and social interaction, and the expectations they create – of accessibility, interaction, and real-time response – are poorly met by the cumbersome form of traditional theatre.

Seven Jewish Children & Shylock

Earlier this summer I received an invite from the Israeli Embassy to spend a week in Israel viewing the best of its theatre. It didn’t suit; but in any case, I decided that I wouldn’t have gone, and wrote to explain why.

I’ve never been to the Middle East and have no first-hand experience of the Israel-Palestine conflict. But, judging from the best of the international media I was able to read during and after the invasion of Gaza in January this year, I came to believe that Israel’s response to rocket attacks by Hamas was both vastly ‘disproportionate’ and conducted in violation of the laws of war.

Journalists shouldn’t, in general, accept hospitality from those they intend to write about.

Review: ‘Romeo & Juliet’

At the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. Published in Irish Theatre Magazine.

At the core of Jason Byrne’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is a scene that is, more typically, neglected: Juliet’s feigned suicide.

It comes after a first half that bustles and bristles, theatre of swaying hips and preying hipsters. Then, after the interval, this early exuberance is allowed to drain like Tybalt’s blood.

For long minutes, our attention is focussed on Juliet’s bedchamber: first, the scene of a bizarrely modest post-coital embrace with Romeo, before he flees; then, the scene of tiresome familial wrangling between Juliet and her nurse and parents.

And then Juliet drinks her vial, and collapses. It goes dark. In darkness (though it is now morning), her nurse enters and finds her, and cries for help. Her mother enters, and then her father who stoops and gathers her in his arms. A dim halo of light rises on this scene of mourning. Then the Friar, and Paris, her intended. They set to keening. The light rises and falls between near-total darkness and a chiaroscuro focus on the scene around the bed. (Lighting is by Paul Keogan.)